Marquette on Drudge — Again
If you are going to get bad publicity, the last place you want to see it linked is on the Drudge Report, a hugely popular news aggregator. We’ve seen reports of daily newspapers in mid-size cities having their servers melt down because of the traffic that a link on Drudge creates. (Not literally melt, you understand.)
So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.
As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.
The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.
Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?
Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.
Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.
But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.
So it can’t have pleased Marquette officials when a link to the Breitbart story on their attempt to fire us appeared on Drudge.
As has been typical in the media, the headline gets the story wrong. We didn’t “defend man-woman marriage,” merely the right of a student to express opinions on the subject without being demeaned and bullied.
The Drudge link is the second one in less than a year. The last time was when the story broke that Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center had, painted on its wall, a mural glorifying cop killer and terrorist Assata Shakur.
Thus, the narrative of Marquette being a place dominated by intolerant political correctness is gaining steam. Will this hurt Marquette?
Many kinds of institutions can be as politically correct as they want with impunity. Ivy League universities, for example, are so prestigious that they can do almost anything and still attract a massive number of applicants. If you can get yourself admitted to Yale, you want to go to Yale, and will tolerate the political correctness.
Public universities, likewise, have a captive clientèle consisting of families that can’t (or don’t want to) pay the high tuition of a private university. Especially if they doubt that the private university provides a better education.
But Marquette, as a mid-level institution (ranked in the top 100 nationally, but not in the top 50) which markets itself as a “Catholic university” and has high tuition, may be especially vulnerable when the notion that it’s actually Catholic becomes more and more transparently untrue.
Labels: Academic Freedom, Assata Shakur, Breitbart, Drudge Report, Intolerance, Marquette University, Marquette Warrior, Political Correctness
posted by John McAdams at 6:25 AM
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